As multinational corporations operate in multiple countries, headquarters must take into account differences in local settings when seeking the means to coordinate and control subsidiaries. The local system of industrial relations sets the framework for what kind of human resource management a multinational corporation can implement. Yet another question is whether the still stronger multinationals can change the existing systems of industrial relations, directly or indirectly. The paper analyzes four Danish enterprises over a ten-year period. This longitudinal study shows that none of the multinationals directly try to interfere in local industrial relations. However, by exercising their management prerogative in a way that differs from the Northern European tradition of industrial relations, they do influence the cooperation between employers and employees. In particular, the results show that a shift from a stakeholder to a shareholder management style and the increased degree of HQ control have an effect on the whole cooperative atmosphere in each of the companies. In the long run, they may affect the collective bargaining system as such.

This paper explores why and how HRM matters for knowledge transfer within multinational corporations. It is built upon the premise that there are certain HRM practices influencing extrinsic and intrinsic motivation of knowledge receivers. It is found that complementarity among HRM practices exists but does not always have a positive effect on knowledge transfer. Three hypotheses derived from these arguments are tested on data from 92 subsidiaries of Danish multinational corporations located in 11 countries.

This paper attempts to fill this gap in the literature by focusing on the influence of knowledge senders’ willingness to share knowledge, their disseminative capacities and the knowledge-transfer opportunities they create on the effectiveness of knowledge transfer. We develop a theoretical framework that examines the impacts of key knowledge-senders’ abilities and behaviors on the knowledge-transfer process. We test our theory using survey data collected from 199 South Korean IJVs. We find that the willingness of foreign parent firms to share knowledge is manifested in their efforts to increase their abilities to articulate and codify knowledge, and to apply those skills to the codification of knowledge relevant to their IJVs. A willingness to share knowledge also plays a role in increasing the opportunities for two-way interactions, especially face-to-face interactions between the parents and their IJVs. The impact of the abilities of foreign parent firms to articulate and codify knowledge for transfer is mediated by the efficacy of their organizational communication systems. We also find that the opportunities created for the transfer of explicit knowledge have a significant impact on such transfers. However, opportunities for transfer of tacit knowledge only have an impact when senders and receivers have similar products and technologies.